The Broncos continue to try to put the mess of 2022 behind them. Last week, The Athletic reported a week before the combine on a host of issues during Wilson’s first year in Denver including his office at team headquarters and his own personal QB coach with access to the building. From the very beginning it was clear that wouldn’t continue under Sean Payton.
When asked at the combine about that comment, Payton reiterated it and responded to how Wilson’s unusual office perks became a story in recent weeks.
“It was just an honest answer,” Payton said. “I know what I'm familiar with and what I'm expecting.
“But for me and this team, when we get into the offseason, I'm going to park a car with no rearview mirrors—those will all be gone. And we got to get past all those difficult things. It was a tough year. ... I don't think the upstairs meeting room matters to anybody. I don't think it matters, because I didn't see any articles from any of you prior to Week 1 or Week 2 when that was happening. But that's what happens when you lose. Then everything gets looked at closely, including the coaching.”
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Payton talked about how his former quarterback, Drew Brees, and Wilson speak with each other often and have houses close by each other in San Diego to the point that Brees texted Payton to jokingly beg him to take the Broncos job so Wilson would stop texting him so much. Payton and Wilson shared a meal together at the Super Bowl along with Joe Montana and their working relationship is in its infancy with the offseason program yet to begin. GM George Paton acknowledged shared blame for how the situation got out of control. Wilson’s private QB coach won’t be in the building, but Denver’s newly hired QB coach Davis Webb will be. The 28-year-old Webb is fresh off the playing field having just finished his second stint with the New York Giants. It’ll make for a rare dynamic in the QB room.
“I’ve been through this one other time when I was with the Miami Dolphins,” Paton said. “We had signed Jason Garrett late in the [previous] season and we had a bunch of quarterbacks get hurt. Coach Saban came in and we recommended Jason to coach Saban and he interviewed him, blew him away and we hired him. I don’t know how many times this has been done—you have to be pretty unique, you have to have a great football mind and I know he knows that position. He’s poised beyond his years, he’s been a coach kind of like Jason throughout his career. Jason played a little more, but I see a parallel there, it can happen. He really impressed a veteran offensive staff when he sat in that room [for his job interview], and I was in that room.”
McDaniels, Brady and the Bucs
Derek Carr isn’t working out in Indy, but he certainly will be a man in demand as he’s reportedly expected to meet with multiple teams after being released from the Raiders on Valentine’s Day. As to why the Raiders made the move, head coach Josh McDaniels said it had nothing to do with potentially taking a crack at coaxing a former QB he coached out of retirement to fill the spot: Tom Brady.
“That decision really had nothing to do with any other player. It was about what we thought was best at the time for us.” McDaniels said. “[Brady] is a great friend of mine and whatever’s best for Tom and his family, and in this case it was to retire. I’m certainly happy for him and that’s not gonna change our friendship.”
Due to Brady’s competitive nature and the fact that he about-faced quickly last year, it will always be difficult for some to believe he’s really hanging it up until the Bucs take the field Week 1 and he isn’t under center. Almost a year ago to the day, before Brady announced he was coming back for the 2022 season, Licht quipped that he’d “leave the desk lamp on” for TB12 if he wanted to return. Today he said it’ll be a flashlight. Licht says he believes Brady has his mind set on retirement and is happy with his decision. As for where the Bucs will go next, that remains to be seen.
Licht expressed confidence in Kyle Trask saying that the team took him in the second round of the 2021 NFL draft for a reason, but he stopped short of naming Trask the Bucs starter before the team has even started its offseason program or added anyone new to the QB room.
“You have to give everybody competition,” Licht said. “He’s the only quarterback on our roster right now. I’m just saying if he were the starter or he was the only option that we had right now we’d be very, very excited about going forward with him and he’s going to get the opportunity no matter who you bring in to be the starter.”
Falcons get peachy during the draft process
The NFL and college football have a decidedly different calculus when it comes to selecting players within the team’s geographic footprint. It’s often just a nice coincidence when an NFL team takes a local prospect and certainly not a prerequisite like it is when a college team is looking to put a fence around their home state.
But in Falcons GM Terry Fontenot’s first draft, he broke the team’s decade-long streak of not selecting a Peach State player when they selected Georgia guard Justin Shaffer, who hails from Ellenwood, Ga., in the sixth round, before drafting Shaffer’s teammate, tight end John Fitzpatrick, 23 picks later (though neither ultimately made the team out of camp).
With UGA being at the top of the college game down the road in Athens and its program pumping out high levels of talent per capita, there’s certainly at least one way Atlanta keeps Georgia on its mind.
“There’s some good players from the Georgia Bulldogs here but there’s also a lot of good players from Georgia here. On our magnets on whether it’s the free agent board or a college draft board, we put a peach on there if they’re from Georgia. That’s something people lose sight of. A lot of players that grew up in this area that might’ve chosen to go to another school, there’s a lot of Georgia natives that are really talented.”
Paton on NIL’s effect on the draft market
There are an untold number of downstream effects that name image and likeness deals have had on college sports, but as that market continues to evolve there is even an impact on professional sports that will be interesting to track moving forward. Players have only been able to be compensated since July 2021, so any takeaways of a market in its infancy are nowhere near to fully formed. But an early trend to at least keep in mind is players with a borderline draftable grade staying in school because they can at least make a little bit of money as opposed to the previous system when they weren’t allowed to.
“I think depth later in the rounds—it happened last year a little bit even—the depth later in the rounds, I felt like we got to the later rounds and it kind of fell off here when in previous years there was a little more depth,” Paton said. “We’ll see, we’re still getting through the process here we’ll have our second wave of draft meetings. … we’ve talked about that a lot, and we’ll see how quickly it falls off this year.”
Paton stressed he had no idea what was going to happen with NIL and that nobody does—it’s part of an evolving market, and NFL teams must evaluate its effect on player motivations.
Joe Rondone/The Republic/USA Today network
Cardinals will lean on Gannon and Ossenfort’s college connections
College coaches going to the NFL is nothing new and it’s certainly not happening at a higher rate than before, but the Cardinals are interesting in the fact that they’ve reportedly hired four coaches from the college ranks for Jonathan Gannon’s initial staff, two of whom (UF defensive coordinator Patrick Toney and tight ends coach William Peagler) were on the same staff at Florida. They will join former Northwestern cornerbacks coach Ryan Smith and Stanford’s Klayton Adams, who will oversee the offensive line.
“I think that’s one advantage that hiring some of these college coaches has,” Ossenfort said. “They bring some institutional knowledge of players and players that they coached and players that they recruited. Those are things that we’re gonna lean on. I’m a fan of any information as long as it’s good information. It helps us in our evaluation process. We will gather all that we can from them and we will use it to help us paint a picture of each prospect that they have some intimate knowledge of. We’ll use that to our advantage as we begin to evaluate these players.”
